Power Field Studio
segunda-feira, 23 de maio de 2016
Frog Leap Studios by Leo Moracchioli - You Have to Check
Leo runs a studio on the westside of Norway where he record and produce bands, do video work and play live shows.
YouTube Adota Uma Nova Ferramenta Para Pagar O "Royalty" Mais Rápido
YouTube Adopts A New Tool For Faster Royalty Payments
One of the things that bugs artists, songwriters and labels about YouTube is that it’s pretty difficult to get precise information about views and payments. In many cases, views aren’t counted and in other cases payments take too long to arrive. YouTube is hoping to alleviate those problems by implementing a new tool based on the DDEXDigital Sales Report Flat File standard.
DDEX is an organization dedicated to standardizing the data of the digital supply chain, and its members include Amazon, Apple, ASCAP, BMI, Google and the 3 major labels. The Digital Sales Report Flat File standard is a way to standardize the data so it’s the same regardless which part of the supply chain its in, from content owners like labels, to performance rights organizations and publishers, to digital retails like Spotify and Pandora.
By adopting this format, YouTube is taking a giant step to not only speeding this standard along to companies and organizations that haven’t adopted it yet, but also much faster and more accurate reports and payments from the service.
Data exchange has long vexed the music industry, as each organization has their own standard primarily based on the accounting system it has in place. In many cases, these accounting systems are old but reliable, and companies are reluctant to spend the money and feel the disruption of implementing something new that might end up not being able to interface with other new systems. As a result, it’s not uncommon for a label or publisher to receive sales data from a distributor, then have to enter it in manually into its own system. Because of the manual component, not only does it take an inordinate amount of time to input, but there are also errors that occur along the way.
Maybe now we’ll all see faster and more accurate royalty accounting. The initial testers of the new standard include YouTube, SACEM, GEMA, BMI, NMP and Kobalt.
sexta-feira, 20 de maio de 2016
Artistas Britânicos Tem Mais Lucros Com As Vendas De Vinil Do Que As Licenças Do YouTube
British artists profit more from vinyl sales than YouTube licensing
British artists have hit out at a discrepancy in their income streams which sees many make more money from the sale of resurgent vinyl records than they do from the ‘meagre’ royalties on offer from YouTube.
Vinyl sales have surged for the eighth year on the trot in the UK on the back of a hipster fuelled nostalgia wave with more than 2m of the outsized discs sold in the UK in 2015, the highest figure since 1994.
This dovetails with the growing global popularity of British artists who now account for one in six of all record sales internationally – a record high.
Despite this new found popularity artists have not benefited from a concomitant rise in YouTube earnings, which contributed a ‘meagre’ £24.4m to the industry as a whole in 2015. By comparison vinyl sales generated £25.1m for labels over the same period.
Both numbers are drops in the ocean compared to total revenues for the British music industry however, which totaled £688m – although that itself represented a fall of one per cent.
John Stillwell/PA ImagesShoppers pack the Love Vinyl record shop in Hoxton, east London.
Geoff Taylor, the chief executive of the BPI and the Brit awards, remarked: “… the fact that sales revenues dipped in a record year for British music shows clearly that something is fundamentally broken in the music market, so that artists and the labels that invest in them no longer benefit fairly from growing demand.
“Instead, dominant tech platforms like YouTube are able to abuse liability protections as royalty havens, dictating terms so they can grab the value from music for themselves, at the expense of artists.”
In response YouTube defended the generosity of its licensing system, saying that it had helped the music industry combat the impact of piracy with its rights management system.
O Que O Som De Uma Marca Faz?
What Does A Brand Sound Like?
Joel Beckerman is a composer and producer who specializes in sonic branding. He's responsible for some of the most iconic sounds used by today's brands.
terça-feira, 17 de maio de 2016
Na Troca Para Streaming, A Música Tem Perdido Bilhões
In Shift to Streaming, Music Business Has Lost Billions
First of all thanks to:
There is plenty of good news in the music industry’s latest sales reportreleased this week. Streaming is up. Vinyl has continued its unlikely renaissance. And did we mention that streaming is up?
But a closer look shows that the big sales numbers that have sustained the recorded music business for years are way down, and it is hard to see how they could ever return to where they were even a decade ago.
Revenue from music sales in the United States has hovered around $7 billion since 2010, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. For 2015, the number was $7.02 billion, up slightly less than 1 percent from 2014.
Within that steady total, however, have been drastic shifts in listener behavior. CDs and downloads have been gradually abandoned as streaming has become the platform of choice.
The result is that the music industry finds itself fighting over pennies while waving goodbye to dollars. For instance, the growing but still specialized market for vinyl records is generating more revenue than the music on YouTube, one of the biggest destinations on the Internet, but that’s because YouTube pays royalties in the tiniest fractions of cents.
Streaming — whether through paid subscriptions to Spotify or Rhapsody; Internet radio from Pandora; or even videos on YouTube — now makes up 34.3 percent of sales, edging out digital downloads as the industry’s biggest source of revenue. In 2015, the year that Apple Music arrived and Tidal was reintroduced by Jay Z, paid subscription services generated $1.2 billion in sales in the United States. After adding in free streaming platforms and Internet radio, the total for streaming is $2.4 billion.
Getting people to subscribe en masse to streaming services has been a priority for record labels and the streaming companies alike, who have often claimed that by building robust subscriber ranks, they would eventually return the industry to its former glory.
But so far streaming has not saved the music business, and deep worries persist about the model. Many artists are suspicious of the deals that their record companies have cut with technology companies, and they want to know how much money is trickling down to them. In a rough analysis of the recording industry association’s numbers, Billboard magazine estimated that the average amount of money generated each time a song is streamed fell last year by about 24 percent, to 0.506 cent. (The fine print: That number, a retail sales figure, covers so-called on-demand streams, excluding Internet radio.)
What gets lost in the battles over fractions of pennies, however, is just how much money has vanished from the music business as consumers have abandoned its most profitable product: the CD.
In 2006 — years after Napster, and well into the iTunes era — record labels still reaped $9.4 billion from CD sales in the United States, more than the total sales revenue of the business today. Last year, CD sales stood at just $1.5 billion, a drop of 84 percent in a decade. And downloads, also once viewed as the industry’s savior, have now been falling for three consecutive years with no sign of recovery.
In a note accompanying the recording industry’s report, Cary Sherman, the group’s chief executive, criticized sites like YouTube — characterized in the report as “on-demand ad-supported” — for what he described as paltry payouts compared to their enormous popularity online. Last year, YouTube and sites like it generated $385 million in royalties. In comparison, vinyl records — a niche if there ever was one — brought in $416 million.
“Reforms are necessary to level the playing field and ensure that the entire music community derives the full and fair value of our work,” Mr. Sherman wrote. (In response, Google, which owns YouTube, objected to its comparison alongside audio-only platforms, referring to it as “apples to oranges.”)
It may be possible for the music industry to wring more money out of YouTube. But it seems doubtful that it will ever earn back what it has lost from the CD.
Só Fazer "Turnê" Não Salvará os Músicos na Era do Spotify
Touring Can’t Save Musicians in the Age of Spotify
First of all thanks to MIKE ERRICO for this article.
Dave Growl of the band Foo Fighters performing in Ansan, South Korea, in July after breaking his leg.
Every couple of months, I see another post in my Facebook feed about a band that was cut off by an 18-wheeler or skidded on a patch of black ice and rolled their van into a ditch. Some members are injured, and they’re launching a Kickstarter campaign to pay for medical bills and to get back on their feet.
My heart (and often, money) goes out to them. But if you need to crowdfund your hospital costs, you were never on your feet to begin with. After many years as a touring artist myself, I’m honestly surprised that the person in that ditch has never been me.
Touring is, of course, the most ancient business model available to artists — and in many ways, it remains a vital part of their livelihood, even while the surrounding industry undergoes major upheaval to accommodate the new paradigm of streaming music. In response to the shift in revenue sources, standard recording contracts now intrude into the numerous nonrecording aspects of an artist’s career. But the advice given to the creative generators of this multibillion dollar industry is still one that would be recognizable to a medieval troubadour: Go on tour.
And yet from a business standpoint, it’s hard to find a model more unsustainable than one that relies on a single human body. This is why we have vice presidents, relief pitchers and sixth men. When applied to music’s seemingly limitless streaming future, the only scarce resource left is the artists themselves. You would think the industry would protect such an important piece of its business model, but in fact, the opposite is true.
The contribution of live touring to the music industry’s bottom line is enormous, and the number is only growing. Consider Taylor Swift: According to Billboard, her live show grossed $30 million in 2013, with another $10 million in merchandise sold. And depending on whom you believe, she made anywhere from $500,000 to $6 million from her catalog on Spotify that year. While she is certainly making money in retail sales and digital downloads, both of those metrics are spiraling downward as people migrate away from the concept of owning music at all. Nielsen recently released numbers indicating substantial drops in both CD and digital-track sales, which are down almost $100 million year over year from 2014; streaming music continues to grow, but the revenue it generates isn’t close to making up the difference, yet.
This means that the bulk of Swift’s income rides on her ability to get to venues safely and perform. It also makes her much-examined decision to pull her 2014 release “1989” from Spotify the financial equivalent of her taking a few months off. Regardless how you look at it, the health of her singing voice is far and away the single most important aspect of her business.
Record labels have followed the money and addressed these changes in the contracts they offer to recording artists. In the predigital era, labels profited only from the physical recordings they funded, but as that income began dwindling, a new logic was applied to the artist-label relationship. Labels argued that by promoting the recordings they owned, they were also promoting the artist’s career as a whole, and were entitled to profit from the full spectrum of artist’s revenue streams — the “360 deal,” named for the totality of its coverage.
But labels do not take on the additional risks associated with their additional profits. Instead of protecting the health of their revenue-generating engine, they simply point to an artist’s independent-contractor status, which releases them from any liability they would be on the hook for if artists were labeled employees. Rather than sparking a labor dispute, these 360 deals quickly became the new normal. As a result, administrators, support staff and office spaces are insured against the risks of doing business, while the company’s income generators — the creators of their master recordings — are on their own.
Artists today are not only touring more to make up for their own lost recording-sales revenue; they’re also being compelled to by the labels that also stand to profit. This makes it a great time to be a fan of live music: From the rise of electronic dance music to the regular resurrections of the Grateful Dead, a major musical event is never far away. But the physical price that artists pay for this easy access is steep. Last summer, Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl was forced to cancel shows when he fell from a stage in Sweden and broke his leg. Other artists with 2015 tour-date cancellations on account of injuries, surgeries and other health issues included Sam Smith, Miranda Lambert, Steve Aoki, Little Big Town, Meghan Trainor, Nickelback, the Black Keys and Kelly Clarkson.
That’s a lot of injuries — and millions of dollars lost. The European shows canceled by Foo Fighters alone, including a headlining slot at the Glastonbury Music Festival, cost the band nearly $10 million in fees and travel expenses.) And of all the instruments on a given tour, the vocal cords are the most vulnerable to the harsh environment the road virtually guarantees; basically anything that inconveniences the ordinary traveler becomes a business risk for the singer. Regardless of the circumstances, the singer has to call on this small, unprotected instrument to deliver on a daily itinerary that can extend from a morning drive-time radio show to the meet-and-greet after the performance.
From royalty rates to basic safeguards against the standard hazards of doing business, recording artists begin the negotiating process with a deck that is stacked against them. This lopsided balance of power allows labels to treat all artists as replaceable until proven otherwise, and both sides know that there is always a long line of hopefuls outside auditions for “The Voice” or “America’s Got Talent” to undercut a young artist’s bargaining power.
The question of why recording artists have been unable to organize and collectively bargain the way other artists have — actors and screenwriters, for example — is one that has dogged them since the dawn of the record deal. Musicians do have a union, the American Federation of Musicians, but it’s not a particularly strong one; it primarily represents members of symphonies, and it hasn’t been on a national strike in 70 years. Recording artists are not really considered core members, because their tenures within the union tend to be shorter than those of lifelong pit musicians and orchestra members. Music is also a traditionally decentralized, live art form with an ingrained renegade spirit. Hollywood, by contrast, has a single dominant hub.
Perhaps musicians’ renegade spirit is what ultimately will save the next generation of recording artists, who are increasingly forgoing record deals altogether and going it alone. As true independents, they work the margin between the technology that makes recordings cheaper to create and a public that is steadily buying fewer of them. Without a label taking a bite out of multiple revenue sources, the numbers can actually work. Others are coming together in groups centered on advocacy and pressing for changes to the laws that dictate royalty payments in the new streaming economy — something that could mean all the difference when injury, accident or age brings a touring musician’s career to a halt. But in the meantime, the vans and buses roll on.
As Melhores Músicas Através de Vídeo Games
I DISCOVER ALL THE BEST MUSIC IN MY LIFE THROUGH VIDEO GAMES, AND I’M NOT ALONE
First of all thanks to Mat Ombler for this article.
I’m pacing across a road that’s been coloured with a century’s worth of dust, waiting for a lone car to pass by. When one starts to crawl from the horizon, I place myself directly in its path. Like clockwork, the car - in this case, a beaten down pick-up truck - comes to a stop. I move around to the driver’s side, point my weapon, throw the vehicle’s occupants out and jam my foot on the gas. As I speed into the sun that’s starting to set over Blaine County, Radio X plays out at full volume over the truck’s stereo.
This isn’t real life; I’m not a carjacker. I’m sat in my pants eating Doritos and playing Grand Theft Auto. Yet the songs on the game’s soundtrack - which range from All Saints and Jai Paul to Suicidal Tendencies and Bob Seger - bring my moments of virtual criminal life closer to reality. Later, I’ll outrun the entire Los Santos police force while Lady Gaga’s “Applause” blares in the background. As my virtual crime spree comes to an end, I decide to ditch the truck and jump in a taxi for a tactical cig break. I hear “El Sonidito” by Hechizeros Band for the first time, and I fall in love with its little beeps.
The scenarios I’ve attached to these songs have brought them into my day-to-day life. As a result, new artists and groups – those who wouldn’t have been on my radar had they not been on the game’s soundtrack – are now on my daily playlist. In fact, there is no relationship quite like the one I have with video games and music.
On the surface, video gamers like me are being introduced to new music. That’s a good thing, because there’s nothing like falling in love with a brand new song from an unexpected source. But underneath it all, there’s a bubbling undercurrent that plays a role in helping to establish the careers of artists and composers alike, bringing them far greater revenue and exposure than ever before. Just think about the gluttony of past and present artists that’ve been discovered through Grand Theft Auto’s radio stations.
So where did it all start? Big name franchises like Grand Theft Auto, FIFA, and NBA are well known for their soundtracks, but the inclusion of popular songs in video games predates their next-gen existence by almost a decade. Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker – which incorporated synthesized versions of the musician's hits, such as “Beat It” and “Smooth Criminal” – is arguably the first video game to include pop music on its soundtrack, arriving in 8-bit glory on the Sega Genesis in 1989. Games like Wipeout 2097 (which included Chemical Brothers and The Progidy on its soundtrack) and Quake (which was scored by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails) arrived shortly after, cementing the idea that including popular music on a game was more than a fad. For me, though, the pinnacle of video game music didn’t come until 1999, with the release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. It’s that game that opened my ears to a whole new world.
Each afternoon I would rush home from school, throw my bag on the floor, and gallop over to the Playstation to tear up the School level on the game. Now, don’t get me wrong: I loved kickflipping down stairs from the confined safety of my settee. But, as a kid living in a world without high-speed internet, the most interesting thing about the game was its soundtrack. Because from Goldfinger to The Vandals, it introduced me to a punk scene I hadn’t heard about before.
As the franchise continued, moving from the Playstation and on to the Playstation 2, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater had a strong influence on my music taste. In some ways, it was like a big brother. Alongside the likes of the Bouncing Souls and Less Than Jake, later editions included Frank Sinatra, Gang Starr, and Public Enemy, opening my ears to new music years before the Swedes dreamt up Spotify. I know I’m not alone in my love for the THPS soundtracks either; they’ve become a sort of cultural reference, entering the nostalgia canon for my generation, with playlists littering YouTube decades after the games were released. And it’s these generation-defining soundtracks that have helped the bands involved sell a lot of records.
Tim Riley - former Activison employee and the man responsible for most of the music within the Tony Hawk series - says Fall Out Boy shifted 70,000 copies of their album in one week after their music was featured in 2005’s Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland. Goldfinger’s “Superman” is now their most popular song, and is seen by many as the title track to the series. Through its soundtrack, the game became synonymous with a millennial love for punk music, and it’s arguable a load of musicians wouldn’t have as established and decorated careers without it.
Since the release of the Tony Hawk franchise, video game soundtracks have exploded. These days, you’re just as likely to see Lorde on the soundtrack to Assassin’s Creed (where she featured on the game’s trailer) as you are on the radio. And who can forget The Sims 3, which commissioned artists as diverse as Damian Marley, the Flaming Lips, and Katy Perry to re-record their songs in Simlish. But these big name titles aren’t the only ones bringing music to the attention of a gaming audience. Take the game Life Is Strange: a third-person adventure title that was released in 2015. It covers some intense subjects, from drug-dealing to abuse, yet what’s special is how the developers of Life Is Strange have carefully licensed music to use as part of the soundtrack, helping to amplify the raw emotion embedded in the gameplay.
[SPOILER ALERT] As the game’s fourth episode wraps up, players are presented with a decision. They can choose to euthanise one of the main protagonists, putting them out of their misery, or they can move forward. Given that the scene is virtual, it sounds trivial, but it’s the inclusion of the Message To Bears track “Mountains” that helps to bring the scene’s raw emotion to life. In fact, it’s so emotional that some fans have cried while playing through the scene. Others have reached out to Message To Bears to say how the song has affected them. Message To Bears tells me he’s “found new listeners” through the game and the track in question now has nearly a million YouTube plays.
Whether it’s driving down the Los Santos freeway or anxiously deliberating over whether to inject a virtual protagonist with morphine, it’s that emotional connection between music and specific scenes in a game that helps to drive music sales. Dan Croll is an electronic artist who has featured in both FIFA 14 and GTA V. One of his tracks featured in a Justin Bieber playlist, but it was his inclusion in the Grand Theft Auto franchise that led to a phenomenal increase in fans, and far outnumbered the traffic from Bieber’s hat tip. “Once GTA V brought me here, I was blown out of the water”, he says. “Games enthusiasts from all around the world were contacting me to say how much the track had connected with them”.
It’s no surprise that video games are now being seen as a profitable method of music distribution. Former CEO of Universal Music, Zach Horowitz, once cited that inclusion in the Guitar Hero series boosts real world sales of an average of 200-300%. Activision chief Bobby Cotick remarked that Aerosmith earned more from Guitar Hero than they ever did from an album. It’s like the vinyl reissue of the video game world. In November, digital sales for Inon Zur’s theme song for Fallout 4 surpassed 17,000. That figure may seem paltry in comparison to major artists, but it’s a high number when you take into account that people have been that into the game they’ve gone out of their way to purchase the title music that plays on repeat.
So given that these bigger, more popular titles have the potential to drive revenue streams further than a Justin Bieber playlist can, it’s perhaps easy to see why Universal Music Group made an investment in Swedish mobile games developer, Nuday Games, last October. The studio’s first release is a trivia-based mobile game called Rock Science: The Rock Game of the Century. Essentially, it’s a pop quiz. Or rather, a rock quiz, as players are quizzed on their knowledge of bands, ranging from Motorhead to Korn.
There’s some skepticism about major labels getting involved at the root core of the industry. Where some developers put music in their game because it increases the artistic quality of the product, others simply use it to promote their title, which is why Jason Derulo was dismally employed to introduce Just Dance 3 to consumers at last year’s international gaming conference, E3. But when it’s done right, these games help sketch out the music taste of gamers - which is especially helpful for the hardcore elite who refuse to leave their console each time there’s an opportunity to gain double XP when playing online.
I discovered some of my favourite bands through games like Tony Hawk’s, Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX and GTA. Listening to AFI’s All Hallows EP takes me back to playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, completing the Foundry level on 100% for the first time. Most recently, the tragic passing of Dave Mirra saw me taking to YouTube playlists as I repeatedly played “What I Got” by Sublime. When I heard the news, it felt like a huge blow had been dealt to my childhood. I spent a portion of my life playing Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX, and owe my discovery of bands such as Pennywise, Sublime and Deftones to the game, as well as countless others.
The influence of these soundtracks hasn’t just affected gamers, either. In a way, these games have the power to shape the music tastes of a generation, and birth entirely new sounds through their influence. From grime to hip-hop, you can’t count the number of musicians who cite Playstation’s Music 2000 as their gateway into production. Bands such as The Reign of Kindo and BadBadNotGood are covering their favourite video game tracks, too. And increasingly, there are tours celebrating the music of video games like Pokemon, where full orchestras play the tracks out live.
Basically, the future relationship for video games and music is so bright it makes me feel kinda nauseous. Games bring music into our life; with them, my music library would probably be a near empty vessel, containing the one David Bryne song that came packaged with my copy of Windows 98. And as all PC gamers know, that would be a terrible place to be.
Follow Mat on Twitter.
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